The world comes to life.  Wisps of green steal across the fields, rich with the promise of spring. Tiny shoots push through the soil. Virgin buds uncoil at the tips of branches. Soft, fresh grass sweeps and swells across the meadows. Thornbushes blossom on the hillsides. The walnut trees have survived the winter, though their antlered crowns still stand bare. Fresh leaves reach longingly for rain from the sky.

The Lord be praised, we reached the village of Kos in the month of April in His Year of 1705. Five times in that year and in the year thereafter was the village laid waste, thrice by the Kurucz bands of the insurrectio Rákócziensis, twice by the Labancz troops of the Emperor. A third portion of the four-and-seventy houses burnt or fell to the ground, and another third were deserted by their tenants, who departed for more peaceful climes. Thus was the joyful tenor of life much diminished in this place; the lands lay fallow, the number of livestock about the houses did likewise decline. As we prepared for our first night there, my grandson Kornél asked, in German: Would it not be better at home? These were words we would oft repeat thereafter.

Thus began Grandpa Czuczor’s story in the canvas-bound folio he was given by his daughter Zsuzsánna. Excellent though his spoken knowledge was of German, Slovak and Hungarian, he had so far written only in German. Having returned to the lands of the Magyar, he wanted to keep the story of their days in his mother tongue, perhaps because he wanted his grandson Kornél to read it when he grew up. The three of them had arrived by cart from Bavaria, whither Grandpa Czuczor and his brother had fled when the dust had settled over what was called, after its chief instigator, the Wesselényi conspiracy. Though the Czuczor brothers were strenuous in their denial of any involvement with the conspirators, some forgeries came to light which sealed their fate: their assets were confiscated and even worse might have followed had they not hastily fled. Over the border they soon acquired skills as typographers and compositors, and established a printing press, later making their mark as book-binders as well. In the guildhall of Thüningen their names were posted as the Gebrüder Czuczur.

Grandpa Czuczor never felt entirely at home in the windswept and rain-sodden lands of the beer-swilling Bavarians, whom in some obscure way he held responsible for the series of deaths that befell his family. Little wonder, then, that when he got wind of the Prince Primus’s patent, he went running to the printing press, where his brother was working on the leads. ‘We can pack our bags!’ he yelled from the steps of the workshop. He pointed excitedly to his crumpled copy of the Mercurius Hungaricus, where a Latin text announced that a return to the depopulated villages of Hungary was now permitted without penalty.

No words of mine could win over my brother to the idea of going home with us. He preferred the comforts of Thüningen, newly acquired but at no small cost, where he wanted to pursue the crafts of printing and binding books. No news of him since that time. Zsuzsánna is troubled by the condition of little Kornél, her son, only in his fourth year of life, who in these straitened times suffers greatly from hunger, in want of meat and even eggs.

Returning by a circuitous route, they set up home in a house with a courtyard, put at their disposal at the edge of the village of Kos. Grandpa Czuczor immediately dug a hole at the bottom of the garden, by the rose bushes, and buried his money there, taking particular care not to inform either his grandson or his daughter of its whereabouts. Only Wilhelm, the servant they brought with them from Thüningen, knew of it, as he had helped with the digging.

‘Wilhelm, du mußt das nie erzählen, verstehst du mich?’ he warned Wilhelm, with an unambiguous gesture: drawing the edge of his palm across the front of his neck.

‘Jawohl!’ yelped the startled lad, as he did at every request or order. All he could manage in Hungarian was a fractured Janapat, ‘Good day!’

Kornél endured much taunting by the other boys for his thin, straw-coloured hair, his oversized, floppy ears, and for the odd German word he would suddenly come out with. He picked up Hungarian quickly, even though these were not peaceful times conducive to study. Indeed, there was ominous news from every quarter.

The scrawny little boy was always hungry, yet never joined the noisy band of village youngsters who, despite a strict parental curfew, spent their days criss-crossing the fields and the forests, stripping them of anything remotely edible. Kornél preferred the company of his grandfather and would sit for hours in the yard where Grandpa Czuczor kept the printing paraphernalia he had brought back home. Kornél would try to make himself useful, but this generally turned out badly, as neither as a child nor later in life was he particularly good with his hands. The blind leading the lame, thought Grandpa Czuczor, as his own ten little servants became ever more spindly and twisted, and acquired an ever more troubling tremor. He had let one of his thumbnails grow into a long, sharp implement that he used for prising type out of its storage boxes; nowadays, try as he might to take care, this nail would split lengthwise and would serve only to scratch his head.

‘Off you go, play with your little friends!’

The boy did not move. ‘I’d rather you told me a story!’

Grandpa Czuczor gave a sigh but was not unhappy to launch into one of his tales. ‘Do you know how my dear late father, Szaniszló Czuczor of Felsofenyves, was granted his patent of nobility by György Rákóczi I, for outstanding bravery in the Vienna campaign?’

‘I do! Tell me about Mother, when Mother was small! And about Mother’s mother!’

Grandpa Czuczor shook his head. It still ached often. In Thüningen he had married a smart and houseproud German woman. Hard-working but undemonstrative, Gisella had borne him six children, of whom all but the last, Zsuzsánna, the Lord had been pleased to take back unto Himself soon after their birth. The births had taken their toll on Gisella and it was not long before she, too, succumbed and joined her five little ones by the side of the Lord. Grandpa Czuczor’s hair turned white when she died, and every morning he would clutch the bony little body of the three-year-old Zsuzsánna desperately to his bosom:

‘May it please the Lord to let me keep you, my one and only!’

The girl would blink in surprise: ‘Was ist das, Vati?’ She did not yet know Hungarian.

‘Ach, du mußt mir bleiben, Liebchen!’ he replied.

***

Zsuzsánna grew into a tall and slim young woman, and in due course married Péter Csillag, the son of another family that had chosen to return. Péter Csillag was granted the joys of married life for less than six months: he was out hunting when he was thrown by his horse and fell so awkwardly that he hit his head on a tree-stump and never recovered consciousness. After two weeks hovering between life and death, he expired.

‘Grandpa! Why won’t you tell me a story?’

So he began to tell a very old story, which he had himself heard in his childhood. Kornél’s great-great-grandfather, Boldizsár Czuczor, was a skilful painter, a portraitist without compare in his time. He had an amazing eye for faces and detail, and he never needed a model: it was enough for him to set eyes on someone once to paint their portrait from memory. His wife Katalin was so beautiful that her fame spread to the neighbouring lands, and though she frequently sat for her husband, she was no leading filly in the matrimonial fidelity stakes. Boldizsár once caught her in flagrante with an officer quartered in the town, but calmly closed the door on them with an unruffled ‘Do enjoy yourselves!’ The couple were at a loss as to what to do, and when they had recovered somewhat, decided to do as they had been bidden. In the morning Boldizsár had a generous breakfast sent to their room and then invited the officer to the baths. There, he covered him, from top to toe, in green paint. News of this spread like wildfire. As the officer was quite unable to scrub off the layer of green, he lay low in his quarters as long as he could. In the end he had to send for Boldizsár and humbly ask him how to remove the paint, as he could hardly spend the rest of his life as a laughing stock. Boldizsár replied: ‘My dear sir, you have covered me in shame that can never be washed away; it is right that you should share my fate!’

‘Last time he painted the woman as well!’ said Kornél.

‘Pardon?’

‘Grandpa, you didn’t tell it like this last time... and the painter did not say they should enjoy themselves!’

‘What did he say, then?’

‘He said,’ Kornél tried to lower his voice to a grandfatherly tone, ‘may you take pleasure in each other!’

Grandpa Czuczor scratched the back of his head. ‘Maybe I did, maybe I did...’ This was not the first time his grandson had surprised him with the keenness of his mind. Only the other day the boy had been asking about numbers and remembered them up to a hundred on hearing them just the once, even drawing their shapes on the surface of his wax tablet. ‘You take after your great-great-grandfather!’

‘Yes, like him I never forget something I’ve once seen.’

‘Indeed?’ Grandpa Czuczor covered the boy’s eyes with the palm of his left hand and asked him: ‘Then tell me what you saw today on my worktop!’

Kornél began to list the items on the regal, as his grandfather called the worktop, clearly and faultlessly, as though ticking them off in his head, in a voice as clear as a bell: ‘Two composing sticks, four balls of twine, one handdruck, one cutting machine, two paper planes, two awls, 30 metres of metal composing rule, two dozen spacers, three rack-cases for letters and spacing materials, seven books, hundreds of printed sheets, one pair of spectacles, two magnifying glasses, two round paper pill-boxes with your medicines in them, which you haven’t yet taken today, the canvas-covered folio by the inkstand, four quills... and one fly!’ He fell silent.

‘How come you know what a composing stick is, or a composing rule, or a handdruck?’

‘I’ve heard the words... and anyway you, dear Grandpa, have written them down in the folio!’

It took Grandpa Czuczor a moment or two to recall that he had indeed made a list of his printing equipment before packing up in Thüningen. ‘Does that mean... that you can read?’

‘Indeed I can!’ said Kornél and, picking up one of the printed sheets, he began slowly but surely to articulate the words, with complete accuracy. Grandpa Czuczor put on his spectacles and followed as Kornél read the rather special text:

BY HIS SERENE HIGHNESS PRINCE FERENC RAKOCZI OF FELSO-VADASZ: On the unimaginable sufferings of our Nation and beloved Homeland under the tyrannical rule of the German Nation, and on the unworthy pains endured by his serene person.

A PUBLIC MANIFESTO, to be placed before the entire Christian world, concerning the innocent nature of the arms acquired by the Hungarians to liberate themselves from the oppression of the House of Austria. First published in the Latin tongue and now again in the Magyar language.

Grandpa Czuczor had picked up a tattered copy of the Prince’s manifesto in a beerhall in Thüningen, from some visiting Hungarians. He meant to reprint it himself at some point.

Suddenly he shook his head. Lord Almighty, this little lad is not yet four years of age and can read fluently! ‘Was it one of your friends that taught you to read?’

‘No.’

‘Well, who then?’

‘No one... I just worked it out for myself.’

‘No fibbing!’

‘I’m not fibbing... I just kept looking at the pages untilI could make out the different letters. Why do they put an f sometimes where there should be an s?’

‘Only when there’s an ess-zet ligature, for sz.’

‘I see. But what about Auftria?’

‘Well, that should also be with sz in Hungarian . . they’ve left out the z...’ Grandpa Czuczor was almost lost for words; he had read this Declaration many times yet had never noticed this misprint. Kornél could make an outstanding proofreader. He called out to his daughter: ‘Ho, come quickly Zsuzsánna, see what this little pipsqueak can do!’

Kornél started to read out the document again: ‘BY HIS SERENE HIGHNESS PRINCE FERENC RAKOCZI OF FELSO-VADASZ... Grandpa why is there no accent on the A and the O?’

‘What accent?’ asked Zsuzsánna, leaning closer.

‘It’s not usual on a majuscule, perhaps on an A or an O,’said Grandpa Czuczor.

‘What does “major school” mean?’ asked Zsuzsánna.

‘Capital letter,’ said Grandpa Czuczor sternly. This much she might have been expected to pick up over all these years. Despite all her father’s efforts, Zsuzsánna had never learnt to read or write. Fortunately, it was not Zsuzsánna’s brains that little Kornél had inherited. 

My grandson Kornél read out what I have written here and I forbore to reprove him, so wonderful was it that he had learnt to read. In general he is very skilful with words. Perhaps he may become a man of the cloth or a university professor? Were times not so hard I should gladly take him to the college at Enyed or Nagyszombat, to see what the professors there made of him. But it is dangerous even to leave the village, let alone travel any distance. They say that only a day’s walk away the Kurucz and the Labancz are preparing to do battle.

Whichever takes flight will likely pass this way. And a defeated army knows no mercy.

Excerpted from The Book of Fathers © Copyright 2012 by Miklós Vámos. Reprinted with permission by Other Press. All rights reserved.